I'm really beginning to get more and more pissed of at Penn. He asks us to think independently but then shoves down our throats two "experts" that contradict opinions as gospel truth.

Do a little research on the two institutions these two skeptics/"experts" represent.

1) Hudson Institute
The Hudson Institute is an American, conservative, non-profit think tank founded in 1961, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation.

Companies such as Eli Lilly, Monsanto, and DuPont fund this place. And YES, they are tied in DEEPLY with BIG AGRICULTURE!!!

2) Reason Magazine
Reason is a libertarian monthly magazine from the Reason Foundation.

Reason was founded in 1968 by Lanny Friedlander as a more-or-less monthly mimeographed publication. In 1970 it was purchased by Robert W. Poole, Manuel S. Klausner, and Tibor R. Machan, who set it on a more regular publishing schedule. As the monthly print magazine of "free minds and free markets", it covers politics, culture, and ideas with a mix of news, analysis, commentary, and reviews.

Key phrase above: FREE MARKETS

People, think for yourselves, even while listening to the very Libertarian Penn Jillette. It doesn't take long to look up some information on your own to find out who's trying to do the real spinning.

If you come to the same conclusions as he does, then great, but don't let him brainwash you the same way he believes the organic farms are brainwashing everyone else.

Me? I actually grow my own food and purchase what I can't grow at a local farm in a valley nearby where they use organic methods to grow their food. I know where the source of the majority of my food comes from; and that's my favorite part of it - knowledge of the source.

>> ^detheter:
This video stands as a monument to the death of the English language as we knew it. RIP One day, all our teachers will be required to freestyle well enough to maintain their street cred, whilst learning all the local dialects, yo


I wouldn't be so pessimistic, detheter, the intrusion of all kinds of slang (from LOLs&OMGs to this) in classroom environment is a phenomenon that I've only heard of being encountered in US and, as weird as it sounds, I think that via globalization foreign influence just might help US get the language back on the right track if what you described starts looking like a futuristic reality.

Also, I wonder if it's a good or a bad thing if I've never even been to the States and was familiar with the majority of vocabulary presented in this video..?

>> ^yourhydra:
this is exactly why I am a futurist and I stand behind Kurtzweil and Michio Kaku 99% of the time, things that seem impossible are really not, and are simply just too incredible to comprehend for most people.



At least Kurzweil bases his predictions on scientific modeling. Most other people just predict what "feels" reasonable.

His predictions on what will be technologically possible at future dates are very good, but I don't put as much stock into his predictions of what will be "popular". It will be neat to see how much social resistance there is once things really start taking off (ie- once biotech matures to the point where we can really start improving intellectual functioning consistently).

Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing how his movie turns out later this year.

http://singularity.com/themovie/

this is exactly why I am a futurist and I stand behind Kurtzweil and Michio Kaku 99% of the time, things that seem impossible are really not, and are simply just too incredible to comprehend for most people.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I loved Accelerando. - you're right, Stross's writing gets a bit muddy at times - but he's a high concept genius. The ideas in the book had me spinning for days.

For me, the best SF writers are futurists - oracles of potential futures- in the tradition of AC Clarke. Stross fits this description nicely.

glad to see this being discussed more often. I'm a futurist and hope to eventually be transhuman, which will definitly be possible to an extent within my life time. go kurzweil!

This video has been declared a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof declared by Stingray.

Sorry, this is a dupe: http://www.videosift.com/video/Microsoft-Futurists-Montage-of-Visions-of-Clean-Technology

*dupeof=http://www.videosift.com/video/Microsoft-Futurists-Montage-of-Visions-of-Clean-Technology

>> ^AnimalsForCrackers:
I'd have to say the Beatles were my biggest rock influence as well.
As a kid, anytime I was over my cousin's house in Vermont, my Uncle would put Abbey Road or Let It Be (sometimes one of Lennon's solo albums) into the tape deck, dump the huge bucket of Legos we had onto the floor, and we'd go to town building gigantic, moving cities on wheels with docking ramps/landing pads for all sorts of transport/attack vehicles and any other amenity you might expect a futuristic moving city to have. We'd sit there quietly (except for the occasional squabble over a choice Lego piece, usually some transparent cockpit covering or neon booster)for hours on end. Then we'd tear it the fuck down and start all over the next time.

...we were 17 at the time.

I'd have to say the Beatles were my biggest rock influence as well.

As a kid, anytime I was over my cousin's house in Vermont, my Uncle would put Abbey Road or Let It Be (sometimes one of Lennon's solo albums) into the tape deck, dump the huge bucket of Legos we had onto the floor, and we'd go to town building gigantic, moving cities on wheels with docking ramps/landing pads for all sorts of transport/attack vehicles and any other amenity you might expect a futuristic moving city to have. We'd sit there quietly (except for the occasional squabble over a choice Lego piece, usually some transparent cockpit covering or neon booster)for hours on end. Then we'd tear it the fuck down and start all over the next time.

Well, spoco, it's an advertisement created by fans of Adobe products.

I'm not sure they were going for the "BEST ANIMATION EVER OF ALL TIME AND INFINITY", but probably something more along the lines of "hey look what we made, isn't it neat?"

And if you can clue the rest of us into this awesome treasure trove of THE BEST ANIMATION EVAR, then freaking sift it.


(and btw: retro? wth in this is retro? looks extremely futuristic to me. but what do I know, I'm just a 12+year animation veteran)

^ I'm on the same wavelength as you. I could spend a couple pages flaying it to pieces, but I've enjoyed the show so much, I'll forgive the total deus ex machina ending that didn't answer hardly any questions.

Two nits I do want to pick. First is the issue of Greek mythology and Zodiac. Did the greeks find the Scrolls of Pithia, some 147,000 years after the Colonials landed? If not, why did they end up with their own version of the exact same frakkin pantheon as the Colonials, long, long, long, long after they must have died out?

Second, is agriculture. As much as the colonials seemed to want to give up technology, they all seemed to be talking about building subsistence farms and shacks. 150,000 years ago, that was a technological revolution larger than the printing press in terms of how it shaped human society. No, it's not the same as laying down a futuristic city in Tanzania 150,000 years ago, but our contemporary society would be some 140,000 years more advanced than it is today.

However, I think they're doing a similar thing to what Babylon 5 did when it ended -- wrapping up character plot, and giving us new major revelations that raise more questions than they answered. They both think they have a new series to slowly work out the rest of their plots (Crusade for B5, Caprica for BSG).

Based on the trailer for Caprica, it looks like the theme of God & Resurrection will be front and center, and since the elevator pitch for that series is that it's also about the genesis of the 50-years-ago branch of cylons, it has an opportunity to answer questions about the final 5, and why they kept saying "this has all happened before..."

All in all it was a good ending on the character front, though I was deeply saddened by their choice to have Roselyn die, and Starbuck vanish. I think they deserved happier endings.

This video has been declared a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof declared by djsunkid.

*dupeof=http://www.videosift.com/video/Interface-Free-Futuristic-Multitouch-Screen-Demonstration-Revolutionary-Computer-Technology-931-min

>> ^Deano:
It would be interesting to see some of these scenarios explored in more detail. I remember a few videos that did this, like farmers conversing about crops but I don't know if it's on the sift.


some of them show up at the end of the current video.